Are You A Believing Man? – Creating a Home(Stead)

For years I’ve had a secret desire to make hay. My first and most enduring experience of farming has always been hay. When I was growing up the boys in my family would congregate in the summer at one or the other of my two aunts’ houses where we would pick up, stack, unstack, and deliver hundreds and hundreds of bales of hay. It was hot, dirty, exhausting work. The type of work that only the competitive spirit of very young men can make interesting – and sometimes not even then.

99% of the time the hay was alfalfa. It was irrigated and we usually had 3 cuttings a summer, each cutting produced between 3500 and 4000 square bales. It was a lot of hay. What stuck with me over the ye…